


Breathe

by Spurlunk



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 04:20:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1455160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spurlunk/pseuds/Spurlunk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drawing is easy and breathing is hard. Except sometimes, it's the other way around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the wonderful cartographies for helping me with this!

For Steve, drawing came easier than breathing. All he needed was a pencil, and the contents of his brain emptied out onto his sketchpad before he even knew what he was thinking about. In grade school, he achieved a minor, fleeting popularity drawing caricatures of teachers and classmates. Of course by the time he entered junior high, the focus was more on looking good and getting girls to notice you, so he was once again the scrawny kid who kept getting into fights he couldn't win. By then it didn't matter, because he had Bucky.

 

Breathing, on the other hand, had always been hard. He never felt like he could get enough air in his lungs, and many a night he'd woken up wheezing and sweating as he tried to do something that the rest of the world could do without even thinking about it. He felt so guilty when Bucky woke up, trying to hide his fear that today would be the day that Steve would simply stop breathing, rubbing his back and getting wet cloths to place on his chest. He stayed up with him until he could catch his breath, Steve wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. On those nights, he couldn't go back to sleep right away, afraid that he would wake up wheezing again. He went out to the balcony, letting the cool night air raise the hairs on his arms as Bucky slept inside. He filled the pages of his sketchbook with drawings of Bucky's sleeping form. He didn't have to even look at him, he could sketch Bucky from memory. Steve knew Bucky almost better than he knew himself.

 

Steve's mother passed away and Bucky, a year older, had been on his own for a while, renting a room and working an assortment of odd jobs to support himself and help his family. Steve moved in with him and tried to get a job as a cartoonist at a newspaper in Manhattan, but it didn't work out. Bucky never made Steve feel like he was a burden, but it weighed on him. He didn't want to be dependent on anyone, he wanted to pull his own weight. He worked for a while at a barber shop, sweeping the floors with a mask tied over his face so he didn't breathe in too much hair and start wheezing and choking again. He took some typing classes with the money he earned and worked for a time taking dictation and typing up handwritten reports for an office downtown, the one man in a group of women.

Much like the Captain America showgirls later on, once they figured out he had talent with pencil and paper, they all wanted him to draw pictures of them. Steve obliged, and though sometimes there were those who accused him of making the girls look prettier than they really were, he hadn't done that intentionally. He just always had a knack for seeing the best in people. Sometimes Bucky said that was his biggest flaw and also his greatest asset.

 

He was used to women seeing him as a little brother, and he didn't really know how else to relate to them. He thought that maybe the sudden increase in distinctly non-sisterly attention he started getting after he was injected with the serum would be the hardest thing to become comfortable with, but it wasn't. Breathing, again, was the most difficult thing, because it was so easy. He could take deep lungfuls of air, as many as he wanted, but he still woke up in the middle of the night, and now Bucky wasn't there. He would get up and walk outside, where often one of the older showgirls would keep him company, offering a whiff of her cigarette, which he would always politely decline. Steve didn't smoke.

They spent three consecutive nights sitting there in amiable silence before she asked him what he was drawing whenever he wasn't taking requests from the other girls. He started talking about Bucky, but he started tripping over his words and eventually he just went back inside to retrieve his sketchbook, handing it to her. He knew that his pictures showed more than he could ever explain in words. She smiled as she slowly flipped through the pages of Bucky, but she stopped on a page with a few sketches of Peggy. Steve had started trying to capture her likeness and stopped, several times, frustrated with himself, but he kept going anyway. In fact, there were pages and pages of just Bucky and Peggy, punctuated by a sketch of the woods or the army camp here and there. She handed the book back to him.

"Your drawings are beautiful, Steve. You should have been an artist," she said. He shrugged, looking away.

"I wanted to serve my country. I didn't think it would be like this."

"A boy like you, you're destined for greater things than this. Your friends are lucky to have you in their lives," she said, and got up, putting out her cigarette with the heel of her shoe and walking back inside before Steve had a chance to tell her thank you.

 

Bucky and Steve had slept in the same bed for years. Bucky had spent more nights at Steve's apartment, growing up, than he had in his own, and when Steve moved into Bucky's room later on, they could only afford a single mattress anyway. Bucky was used to falling asleep to the rhythm of Steve's uneven breathing. When he came back, there was no question he and Steve would be sharing a bunk, but it was at the same time both foreign and familiar. There was an undeniable comfort in being close to his best friend again, but his steady breathing was throwing Bucky off. Eventually he fell asleep, only to be plagued by nightmares of the torture he had just been put through. He woke up, heart racing, only to find himself all alone.

Hair messy and eyes bleary from sleep (or lack thereof), he walked outside into the light drizzle, ducking underneath the awning. Steve was sitting there, drawing. When he saw Bucky walk up, he quickly shut his sketchbook and stood up.

"Are you alright?" he asked, immediately by his friend's side.

"Yeah, I'm fine, I just couldn't sleep. Woke up and you weren't there."

"Sorry, I wake up at night sometimes. I don't think I need as much sleep now, and I'm used to waking up, from before." Steve said, sitting down again.

"I remember. Mind if I keep you company?"

"Not at all, you know that," Steve replied, and Bucky sat next to him, snatching the sketchbook away before his friend could protest.

"Jerk," Steve said, but the fact that he wasn't actually grabbing his sketchbook back told Bucky that he didn't really care if his friend looked at his art. Bucky flipped through the pages. There were many, many drawings of him, smiling, laughing, the pages like a mirror of happier times. Bucky still smiled, but it didn't quite feel the same.

"Have you shown these to Agent Carter?" he asked, getting to the sketches of Peggy. They were interspersed with the others, because Steve found Peggy's face very challenging. Bucky was an extension of himself, and easy to draw, he had plenty of practice after all. Peggy however, had a beautiful, striking face that he never could get quite right. Superficially it was there, an exact likeness, but something about her, that spark and fire, he could never figure out how to convey.

"No. I need to get it right first."

"Looks right to me. You've always been good at this, your drawings are like photographs," Bucky said, handing the sketchbook back to his friend.

"No, there's something not right yet."

Bucky shrugged and leaned back against the wall, shutting his eyes.

"You should go back inside. Go back to bed. You've been through a lot," Steve said.

"Not without you," Bucky said, and Steve nodded, helping his friend to his feet and leading him back to their bunk. They settled down in the bed, and Bucky finally fell back asleep. Steve lay there, his friend's heart beat and even breathing keeping him from feeling alone in a room full of sleeping soldiers.

 

Steve barely had time to process Bucky's death before he flew that plane into the water. Then he woke up, and everyone important to him was gone in one fell swoop. He was never the type to talk to people he didn't know about his feelings, so as soon as the SHIELD doctors let him out, he went and bought a sketchpad and a few number two pencils. They were more expensive than what he was used to, but they felt exactly the same. He started off as he always did, just drawing the first thing that came into his brain, but all that came out were faces - Peggy's face and Bucky's face and it just hurt too much to see them there on the page before him, as if this was exactly like all of the other times he had drawn them. Drawing Bucky made him feel like he just had to turn around and there he would be, sleeping in the other room. Drawing Peggy made him feel like she was still out there, leading men and saving lives in her red lipstick and smart uniform. But neither of them were here, and he was all alone and he thought maybe he just better stick to drawing what was outside of him rather than what was inside.

Steve's sketchbook was still filled with drawings of buildings and trees when SHIELD fell apart. Since moving to DC, he'd gone around looking at the various monuments, and that added a little bit of variety to his art, but he had always felt like he was his best when drawing portraits. The only problem was that every person he tried to sketch, be it Natasha or a random tourist he saw snapping photos of cherry blossoms, came out as Peggy. He felt as though he was being taunted, the fact that when she was young he could never get her face just right no matter how hard he tried, but now, his drawings of her came out devastatingly perfect.

 

When he found out that his friend was the Winter Soldier, he was running on adrenaline. It wasn't until he was in the car with Sam, driving cross-country on their road trip to find Bucky, that he came crashing down. He wasn't driving at the time, but he had trouble breathing. He thought he was having another asthma attack, but that wasn't possible, not now, not like this.

"You okay, buddy?" Sam asked, his brow furrowed with concern, but Steve couldn't answer. He was flashing back to his childhood, waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, but this was different because Bucky, Bucky wasn't here -

"I'm pulling over, I'm pulling over," Sam said, coming to a stop, and reaching over Steve to open the car door. Steve stumbled out into the grass and threw up what he'd eaten for breakfast that morning. He felt a comforting hand on the small of his back and for a split second let himself think it was Bucky, before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and turning around.

"Better out than in, right?" Sam said with a reassuring smile. Steve tried to smile back but he didn't think it looked right.

"I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me." he said, putting a hand on Sam's arm in thanks.

"Don't worry about it. Feeling better?"

"Yeah, yes. I'm fine now."

They got back in the car, and Sam turned the radio back on. After a few minutes, Steve pulled out his sketchbook and began to draw.


End file.
